Tag Archive | Liverpool
Liverpool Central Library reopens: inside the cathedral of learning
The opening of Liverpool’s first free public library on 18 October 1860 was marked by a public holiday and a day of celebrations, culminating in spectacular firework displays. Yesterday, Liverpool celebrated again: from 9:00 am to midnight, thousands poured through the doors of that same library, reopened after two years being rebuilt to a spectacular […]
Cressington and Grassendale parks: river access restricted
Recently, when describing a Mersey estuary walk along the Garston shore, I wrote that, on arriving at the boundary of Garston docks, this as far as you can go: Garston Docks and the private residential Grassendale and Cressington Esplanades prevent public access to the riverside. The docks I can understand, but as a freeborn Englishman […]
Now I know that Spring will come again. Perhaps to-morrow?
Yesterday the first day of spring, today blizzards in a north-east wind. Winter hasn’t let go this year: we’ve been stuck with anticyclonic conditions for three weeks, and this has sucked in cold air from Scandinavia. For a while the weather was crisp, then it turned cold, damp and murky. Today, an Atlantic weather front […]
Along the Cast Iron Shore
Is there more than one Cast Iron Shore? The question arises after reading a feature in today’s Guardian – Ken Grant’s best photograph: a child on the Merseyside coast – in which the Grant talks about photographs taken as he walked between his home in New Brighton to ‘a place known as the Cast Iron […]
A poem on Otterspool Prom
Carol Rumen’s current Poem of the Week on The Guardian website grabbed my attention since its subject – Otterspool Prom – is the riverside walk and area of parkland by the Mersey where I often walk our dog. It’s by Peter Robinson who, I have to admit, is a poet I’ve not encountered previously, even […]
A walk in the edgelands: along the Garston shore
We’re still enjoying days of crisp, February blue skies, so when I had to get something from B&Q on Speke Retail Park, I decided to take our dog and walk a stretch of the Mersey estuary shore I hadn’t explored before. Two minutes drive from the bustle of the shops and the roar of traffic […]
Dickens, injustice and Hillsborough
I’m currently reading The Old Curiosity Shop and, in one of those curious coincidences without which Dickens’ plots would have ground to a halt, I read the following passage shortly after hearing news that the Hillsborough families are one step closer to justice: Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very questionable […]
On the beach at Formby
On a crisp December morning we returned to one of our favourite places – Formby beach, a 20 minute drive from our house in Liverpool. We walked through the dunes, and the closer we got to the sea the more the wind whipped in, cold and bracing, off the estuary. Since we were here last, […]
Elbow live in Liverpool: Everyone’s here
To someone who grew up when the hit parade and radio playlists were experienced in common by everyone, the fragmentation of the music scene in recent decades can seem depressing. Music is no longer something enjoyed in common: instead, jostled next to each other on bus or tube but sealed inside our headphones we listen […]
Hillsborough: collusion and cover-up
Sheila Coleman, spokeswoman for the Hillsborough Justice Campaign gave the first lecture yesterday in the 2012 Critical Research Seminar Series at Liverpool John Moores University Centre for the Study of Crime, Criminalisation and Social Exclusion (CCSE). It was a timely event, given the recent publication of the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, an event […]
